Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web:
Industry insider breaks down labels vs musician math: Troy Carter, a talent manager and founder of Atom Factory, spoke at Disrupt SF about the role of labels as the middle men in the streaming economy. His talk went into detail about the earning power of streaming services and why artists see such small dividends from their high play counts.
PPM killing HD radio? A blog post from Harker Research examined the impact of Nielsen’s portable people meter (PPM) metric on HD radio. The compression used for HD radio can remove content that PPM needs to consistently encode broadcasts. Nielsen has said it is working on improvements, but the company voiced concerns that the top dog would be able to accurately reflect encoding reliability for HD-2 and HD-3 channels.
Using mobile devices for surround sound: We’ve seen wireless speakers rise to more prominence in an increasingly crowded field, but a new app could create a similar sonic experience from a collection of mobile devices. AmpMe is a mobile app that creates a network of speakers. The host device starts listening, then anybody who wants to add to the volume can use a code to play the same track from their own phone. So far it only works with SoundCloud tracks, although more services will be added.